Dance training shapes action perception and its neural implementation within the young and older adult brain

How we perceive others in action is shaped by our prior experience. Many factors influence brain responses when observing others in action, including training in a particular physical skill, such as sport or dance, and also general development and aging processes. Here, we investigate how learning a complex motor skill shapes neural and behavioural responses among a dance-naïve sample of 20 young and 19 older adults. Across four days, participants physically rehearsed one set of dance sequences, observed a second set, and a third set remained untrained. Functional MRI was obtained prior to and immediately following training. Participants’ behavioural performance on motor and visual tasks improved across the training period, with younger adults showing steeper performance gains than older adults. At the brain level, both age groups demonstrated decreased sensorimotor cortical engagement after physical training, with younger adults showing more pronounced decreases in inferior parietal activity compared to older adults. Neural decoding results demonstrate that among both age groups, visual and motor regions contain experience-specific representations of new motor learning. By combining behavioural measures of performance with univariate and multivariate measures of brain activity, we can start to build a more complete picture of age-related changes in experience-dependent plasticity

Cognitive mapping deficits in human aging

The key resources table, and source data for the paper "Increased hippocampal excitability and altered learning dynamics mediate cognitive mapping deficits in human aging

Dance Training Shapes Action Perception and Its Neural Implementation within the Young and Older Adult Brain

How we perceive others in action is shaped by our prior experience. Many factors influence brain responses when observing others in action, including training in a particular physical skill, such as sport or dance, and also general development and aging processes. Here, we investigate how learning a complex motor skill shapes neural and behavioural responses among a dance-naïve sample of 20 young and 19 older adults. Across four days, participants physically rehearsed one set of dance sequences, observed a second set, and a third set remained untrained. Functional MRI was obtained prior to and immediately following training. Participants’ behavioural performance on motor and visual tasks improved across the training period, with younger adults showing steeper performance gains than older adults. At the brain level, both age groups demonstrated decreased sensorimotor cortical engagement after physical training, with younger adults showing more pronounced decreases in inferior parietal activity compared to older adults. Neural decoding results demonstrate that among both age groups, visual and motor regions contain experience-specific representations of new motor learning. By combining behavioural measures of performance with univariate and multivariate measures of brain activity, we can start to build a more complete picture of age-related changes in experience-dependent plasticity.ISSN:2090-5904ISSN:1687-544

Action prediction in younger versus older adults: Neural correlates of motor familiarity

Contains fulltext : 116607.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)Generating predictions during action observation is essential for efficient navigation through our social environment. With age, the sensitivity in action prediction declines. In younger adults, the action observation network (AON), consisting of premotor, parietal and occipitotemporal cortices, has been implicated in transforming executed and observed actions into a common code. Much less is known about age-related changes in the neural representation of observed actions. Using fMRI, the present study measured brain activity in younger and older adults during the prediction of temporarily occluded actions (figure skating elements and simple movement exercises). All participants were highly familiar with the movement exercises whereas only some participants were experienced figure skaters. With respect to the AON, the results confirm that this network was preferentially engaged for the more familiar movement exercises. Compared to younger adults, older adults recruited visual regions to perform the task and, additionally, the hippocampus and caudate when the observed actions were familiar to them. Thus, instead of effectively exploiting the sensorimotor matching properties of the AON, older adults seemed to rely predominantly on the visual dynamics of the observed actions to perform the task. Our data further suggest that the caudate played an important role during the prediction of the less familiar figure skating elements in better-performing groups. Together, these findings show that action prediction engages a distributed network in the brain, which is modulated by the content of the observed actions and the age and experience of the observer.15 p

Representing others' actions: the role of expertise in the aging mind

Item does not contain fulltextA large body of evidence suggests that action execution and action observation share a common representational domain. To date, little is known about age-related changes in these action representations that are assumed to support various abilities such as the prediction of observed actions. The purpose of the present study was to investigate (a) how age affects the ability to predict the time course of observed actions; and (b) whether and to what extent sensorimotor expertise attenuates age-related declines in prediction performance. In a first experiment, older adults predicted the time course of familiar everyday actions less precisely than younger adults. In a second experiment, younger and older figure skating experts as well as age-matched novices were asked to predict the time course of figure skating elements and simple movement exercises. Both young age and sensorimotor expertise had a positive influence on prediction performance of figure skating elements. The expertise-related benefit did not show a transfer to movement exercises. Together, the results suggest a specific decline of action representations in the aging mind. However, extensive sensorimotor experience seems to enable experts to represent actions from their domain of expertise more precisely even in older age